Last November, Josh Blaine was traveling down the coast of California, with the vague intention of reaching Mexico, when he stopped in Santa Barbara. Outside the city’s art museum, he caught sight of a man sitting next to a bike … Read More
“Tangled Up in Blue” is not Bob Dylan’s most convoluted song; “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” with its references to eleven-dollar bills and hanging around in ink wells, probably wins that title. It is not even the most confusing ballad on Blood on the Tracks; Wendy Lesser is right on in her analysis of “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts”: “There are these huge gaps…what [Dylan] leaves out is more interesting in some ways than what he puts in.”
A few weeks ago, I was plugging away at my JP in the Mendel Music Library when I heard the unusual sound of shouting and pounding feet. I looked out the window and saw a small, male redhead running past Prospect House naked, yelling into a bullhorn.
My students keep asking me why I am here. It is a good question. I am an anomaly at Greenville-Weston High School. I am white in a school where most teachers, and nearly all students, are black. My race fascinated my tenth graders for the first few days of school. One student asked if I found the term “white” offensive, and if I would prefer that he refer to me as “Caucasian.” Several students asked to touch my hair.
“It’s hard to know what the Booker means in America. Americans aren’t eligible. Does that make them lose interest, or does it give the prize a mystique?” Alan Hollinghurst wondered aloud during an interview last week in his office at 185 Nassau.
The first two times I read Franny and Zooey, I was going through, to borrow a phrase from Salinger, a “blue period.” I have come to identify these low times with the term “melancholy,” a gloomy Victorian adjective that has … Read More
The morning of the Colin Powell lecture, I stood in line outside of Richardson Auditorium with my friend Beth. Beth takes Arabic. Last summer, she worked for a senator in Washington. She just applied to Woody Woo. She knows her … Read More
Every Princeton senior experiences the same dilemma when searching for a post-graduation: to go to Wall Street or not to go to Wall Street. The lure of a New York finance job is difficult to resist, with its high salary … Read More
For the last six months, people have been warning me about October. A few weeks after I received my acceptance e-mail from Teach for America, a man from the staff called me to discuss the school where I would teach in the fall.
Early one morning in mid-October, while most of his classmates were sleeping off hangovers or late night study sessions, Zack Woolfe sat in front of his computer, eagerly pressing his internet browser’s “Refresh” button. The Princeton University senior was up … Read More