Greenville, Mississippi looks like a town that the Civil Rights movement forgot. Four decades after the Freedom Summer, this “Queen City of the Delta” still has two of just about everything: two McDonalds, two Catholic churches, two sides of town. There are two Kroger grocery stores. The one with the organic milk and fancy cheeses is called the “white Kroger.” The one with the wilted produce and meager selection is called the “black Kroger.”
Nearly every object in the Princeton University Chapel has been given in someone’s memory. Names of dead Princetonians are etched on the backs of pews, on plaques at the bases of statues, on the very stones that form the Chapel … 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.
“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.”
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
Being an outsider—or at least portraying yourself as one—pays in a Princeton USG presidential race. For the past three presidential elections, the USG Vice President has run and lost to a candidate that promised to be a breath of fresh air in the stale world of Princeton student government.
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
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
“Most plays have this rule imbedded in them,” said Khalil Sullivan two days before opening night of “Playing in the Dark,” which he wrote and directs for his senior thesis. “A play has an action, a desire that characters want, and obstacles in the way of completing that action.”
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.