“Morphing Double N.” That was the link I clicked on, the link at which I knew that researching this article, on lolcats of all things (a joke so quirky-yet-plain that it netted coverage in Time), was going to lead me all the way down, through every level of adolescent offensiveness into the final stage.

You might have heard that a half-black man named Barack Obama is running for President. This sounds ridiculous, but the last few weeks have revealed that some have not.

The audience for Samantha Power last Friday appeared to be the usual crowd for talks at Princeton: half students interested in the subject matter at hand, and half older townies getting a taste of culture. “War Crimes and Genocide Today: What Can One Person Do?” was hosted by the Woodrow Wilson School, and it showed in the composition of the crowd. The students had a confused, sympathetic mixture of careerism and noblesse oblige; one, after asking what she should do to prepare for her trip to Bosnia this summer (that’s right, she’s going to Bosnia, folks! Sniper fire!), was happily offered a card from the wife of a UN official. The older ones, on the other hand, had the weary, insecure but comfortable look of those inhabiting the many, multiplying rings of power just outside the one that matters. “What can one person do,” of course, is heard by all of these people as “What can I do?”—a question that, in its necessity and its limitations, cuts to the heart of what is both brilliant and unfortunate about Samantha Power.

A week and a day after I saw Dan Deacon play his new DVD, Ultimate Reality, at Bard College, I saw him buying a camera at B&H in Manhattan. B&H is probably what the Nazis feared the planet would look like by now: an electronics store run and mostly staffed by Orthodox Jews, every item carried from the shelf to the salesman to the register by conveyor belts, each one tricked out with neon blue trim.

I had never heard a Jonas Brothers song before the first week of this school year. I was throwing a pre-game for Lawnparties, offering Tequila Sunrises and mojitos in the a.m.—the youngest oldest thing Princeton students do. The eclectic and up-to-the-minute iTunes playlist I had made for the occasion had run out, and some roommate of a friend had taken over the computer to keep the mood going. “‘Burnin’ Up’!” someone requested. Probably the new Usher single, I thought, and then a nineteen- or twenty-year-old played me my first Jonas Brothers song. “Don’t they wear chastity rings?” I asked no one.

GREATEST INVASION IN FOREVER—NORMANDY
In the undisputed declaration by McCain, the American invasion of Normandy in World War II is “the greatest invasion in history, still to this day, and forever,” although he promised, snickering, that his future land war in Asia would give it a “run for its money.”

WICKEDEST CENSORS—CNN
“Hey, can I call you Joe?” she asked. “[Off-mike],” he responded.

HE MAKE IT RAIN HE MAKE IT RAIN HE MAKE IT RAIN HE MAKE IT RAIN—GEORGE BUSH
“[T]his is a final verdict on the failed economic policies of the last eight years... that essentially said that we should strip away regulations, consumer protections, let the market run wild ...

When browsing classic disco blogs—always maintained by sweaty, foreign men, a tendency I have learned from the pictures of themselves they publish inexplicably—one can only judge the quality of the records by their album covers. There are no band biographies, no album reviews, no other photographs: it is a cultural archive without history or salesmanship. Determining quality with so little information is a delicate but logical process, the mechanics of which can only be explained by example.

This past Sunday, three of the Nassau Weekly’s best-trained sabermetricians compiled data from Princeton Facebook in order to rank the graduating class of seniors in an objective and accurate manner according to a single metric: notoriety. This was not hard. No computer programs were required, although they might have helped. All the team had to do was log in to facebook.princeton.edu, run an Advanced Search for the class of 2009, and copy one piece of information from each of the 1,198 profiles: Profile Views.

It's the little things you remember when you die.
The children. The moments. Your face after
achieving multiple simultaneous orgasms. The orgasms.
The presidential campaigns, the incipient volcano
underlying the western half of the continental U.S.
It's the little things that make you wonder.

People change. People estrange. The wear and tear on the asbestos flange
took my grandfather at seventy-five. My grandmother is alive,
and turning eighty. The moon landing is forty. I am twenty. Ten, five.

Bam. B-r-ck, b-r-ck. No one is dead. No one is here.
This is a poem about my brother in Afghanistan.

Live Blogging of the President's address on December 1, 2009.

Bright Star starring John Keats
John Keats rests his head as angular
as two racially white blades of hay.

Life Story starring Jeff Goldblum
The mystery has a name, Jeff Goldblum.

Close your eyes. Are they closed? No, good point, I guess you’ll need to keep them open to read the Powerpoint. Okay, close them when you can, and otherwise close your inner eye, or eyes. The number of inner eyes may depend on the species of your spirit animal ...

Late last month, WPRB News sat down with General David Petraeus, commander of United States Central Command and recent recipient of Princeton’s James Madison Medal, to discuss military issues in the Middle East, from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to drones and cybersecurity. Nick Tagher, Naomi Nix and ...

As Avatar gradually accrued its second billion dollars in the last few weeks, coverage of the film itself (rather than its receipts) sank from complacent praise to idle speculation. Was the film racist? Well, accidentally. Is there going to be a sequel? Sources say! And how about that sex scene ...