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Byline: Joshua Leifer

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Back to Basic

The word “basic” was dead by the time Kreayshawn said it in 2011: “Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada / Basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother.” But in the word’s afterlife, “basic” has ceased to apply just to “basic bitches” and now affixes itself to all sorts of actions, objects and people.

by Joshua Leifer on October 18, 2014October 19, 2014

Entrepeneurship’s Hostile Takeover

The people who introduced us to everything “social” and all things “innovative” have political positions and ideological stances that impact policy in real and tangible ways. As the language of entrepreneurship creeps into our vernacular, the politics of the entrepreneurial class creep into the halls of government.

by Joshua Leifer on October 19, 2013November 10, 2013

A Food Made from the Pressed Curds of Milk

For a person with dietary restrictions, food in America is like a dense minefield of things he or she cannot eat. Meat and cheese are everywhere, sneakily stuck in the most unsuspecting locations.

by Joshua Leifer on March 30, 2014March 30, 2014

Soul Music

Hundreds of people are crammed into a tiny room and the room is pulsating—not in a figurative, metaphorical sense, but literally. Bodies bounce against each other, arms and legs thrash out angularly, and heads bang in unison.

by Joshua Leifer on December 6, 2014December 7, 2014

Radio Killed the Hockey Star

Flanked by two shaven-headed handlers, Martin Brodeur sat at a rickety wooden table that looked slightly too small to be comfortable in a bookstore that has long since been put out business. Outside the store, devoted fans lined up for yards, standing in concentric loops in an adjacent strip mall, chattering excitedly or fidgeting with their fans’ jerseys—this was before smartphones dulled the pain of waiting on a line.

by Joshua Leifer on July 5, 2014September 28, 2014

Peer Review

Since the beginning of time, editors at The Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application Essays. And yes, The Nassau Weekly has been around since the beginning of time. Here, in the billionth incarnation of this … Read More

by Joshua Leifer, Rachel Stone on April 26, 2015May 4, 2015

In the Nation’s Pocket

Student activists campaigning for divestment—from fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturing companies, or companies operating in the Israeli-occupied West Bank—must face an administration that for decades has refused to acknowledge the central point at the very core of any divestment campaign: that the university’s investments should be considered as part of the university itself.

by Joshua Leifer on November 23, 2014December 7, 2014

Jewish Wisdom

Love, lust and etsah in the bubble.

by Aron Wander, Joshua Leifer on February 21, 2015February 22, 2015

Princeton Is Never Neutral

In the early hours of a Friday in the spring of 1978, two hundred and ten Princeton students piled into Nassau Hall and occupied it for twenty-seven hours.

by Joshua Leifer on April 18, 2015April 26, 2015

Nothing to Lose But a Leash

On October 5, 2013, The New York Times published an op-ed by Dr. Gregory Berns, a professor at Emory University who concluded from a neurological experiment on man’s best friend that “dogs are people, too.” To examine dogs’ brains and their responses to emotion and perception, Dr. Berns trained them to sit silently still in an MRI scanner.

by Joshua Leifer on February 22, 2014February 23, 2014

Playground Prejudice

There are thirteen churches and one synagogue in the town where I grew up. It is an anomaly for Bergen County, which is known for, among other things, the heavily Jewish bastions of Fairlawn and Teaneck. My synagogue community is small when compared to communities in the more Jewish towns, though it is larger than others in the county’s northwestern corner.

by Joshua Leifer on April 26, 2014April 27, 2014

PrinceWatch

It is that time of year again, when the breezes grow colder and the leaves begin to turn, when the freshmen amble onto campus looking for love and the fast-track to Goldman Sachs, and when the Daily Princetonian’s ancient printing press begins to crank out the book reports, advertorials, and speculative fiction it is famous for. It is time, of course, for PrinceWatch.

by Joshua Leifer on September 28, 2014October 5, 2014


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