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.
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.
Last month, the members of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society found Edward Snowden guilty of treason. On other campuses—even Princeton’s aristocratic, Northeastern peers—Edward Snowden is a kind of geek-dissident hero who harnessed his hacking powers for good to reveal the excesses of the National Security Agency.
Barry (whose name has been changed for this article) is a gangly kid who looks to be somewhere in that stretch of late adolescence characterized by patchy moustaches. In another world, Barry, gregarious and talkative, would be captain of his school’s debate team, or maybe a theater major. He is funny and he knows it.
Dear Aron & Josh, Someone in my frat is making me fast for a week. I really don’t want to drop out of the frat but I don’t know if I can make it a week with just water. Help?
What does it mean to rage? The word’s attractiveness results from the contingencies it contains. “Rage” is an expression of promise and uncertainty. The potentialities inherent in raging create the possibility for spontaneity in a place where it rarely exists. Life at Princeton is highly routinized. We live according to the logic of the Google Calendar. We schedule leisure time. We diastinguish between productive and unproductive activity. To rage in the moment is to temporarily shatter the predictability of existence in our human capital factory.
We cannot presume that Rick Ross is a mastermind, a genius or even sober. We cannot attest to his level of education, his employment history, or his net-worth. We have no idea where he came from: he claims to be Mohammed, the son of Moses, and the reincarnation of Haile Selassie. But, as he tells us on his latest album: none of that matters.
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.
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.
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.
While for some students, the middle of junior year marks the beginning (or a continuation) of a cushy and well-heeled existence, for others it is the moment when downward mobility becomes a reality.