Nadine Jordan will be working late tonight. She does so every night, often from five in the afternoon until two in the morning, handling the steady and familiar flow of customers at the U-2. “It’s usually pretty busy here throughout my shift,” she says. “I hardly get a chance to catch my breath.”
But this is a job she needs. The sandy-haired, former stay-at-home mother took this job, with all its drama and tedium, because she needs the paycheck. Yet like most who appear to live simple, unencumbered lives, there is more behind this cashier than just cigarettes and beef jerky. She has a long and heartbreaking past.

Polarization pays. For every DailyKos, there’s an O’Reilly Factor; for every Michael Moore, an Ann Coulter; for every Russ Feingold – a liberal populist Senator eyeing the Presidency – there’s a Sam Brownback, an evangelical conservative Senator hoping for the same. Alienation has bolstered both sides, spiking viewer ratings ...

I had never seen ping pong look so good. In fact, before this Saturday, when the Princeton Table Tennis Club played Peking University’s team, I had never even seen competitive ping pong played before – excepting a few scenes in Forrest Gump, when Gump ‘played’ the Chinese national team as ...

Tamir Goodman sits at an empty table, waiting for the guests to arrive. Slouched in his chair, Goodman seems like any other Orthodox Jew who would visit Rabbi Eitan and Gitty Webb’s home (the Chabad house on Nassau Street), save for his flaming red hair and beard. He wears ...

David Dobkin is a busy man. As Dean of the Faculty, he supervises the hiring and tenuring of professors, and oversees each academic department on campus. A former computer science professor, Dobkin has also found time to teach a freshman seminar, and he serves as a JP advisor. But no matter how full his day becomes, Dobkin never neglects his side job: faculty photoblogger.

“What’s the point of instruments?/Words are a sawed off shotgun,” cries Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke on the band’s newest studio album, (In Rainbows). How true those words are. It’s not that the music on the band’s newest disc isn’t worth listening to.