You are a brand. The sun-drenched, chrome-filtered frames of your Instagram feed; the captioned albums on your Facebook profile. Your six-word Twitter bio, clever without pretension.
“What is that thing?” I watched in confusion as Anna exhaled a thin stream of what looked like smoke into the cramped air of her bedroom. With only a few weeks left in our senior year, we had spent the afternoon trading high school reflections and speculating about the mysteries of college, now only months away. Real schoolwork and the anxieties of the application process now behind us, these last months of spring had begun to feel like a sort of limbo, a time of licensed aimlessness before the fall brought new routines.
Lily Gellman, a freshman, is one of fifty students who auditioned for Ellipses, Princeton’s slam poetry team, this fall. Gellman, who became involved in spoken word during her senior year of high school, hoped to continue to hone her passion for spoken word at Princeton and was excited to discover a slam team on campus.
When, on February 9, the New York Post announced that Miley Cyrus had submitted a short film to the first-ever New York Porn Festival, countless gossip blogs rushed to report on Cyrus’ final descent into vulgarity.
Wu Hall’s Matthew T. Mellon Library is one of the quaintest and most secluded study spaces on the Princeton campus. The “library” in its name is slightly misleading, given that Mellon does not actually hold any books, only a printer, a few tables, and a series of back-to-back wooden cubicles for high-power cramming.
When the Daily Princetonian announced, on October 6, that grade deflation was “dead,” campus remained oddly quiet. There was no cheering, no laughing or dancing or popping of screw-top champagne.
There’s no reason that competence and authenticity should be odds with one another. Yet many of the ways that we read authenticity—Bernie Sanders’ oversized suits, per say, or Trump’s disregard for political correctness—do defy the codes through which we usually measure a candidate’s fitness for office.
I joined LinkedIn the summer before sophomore year. I had just started my first “real” internship, a public relations gig at a radio station in Boston, and felt remarkably grown-up sitting in a cubicle in black pumps and a pencil skirt.
The performance was viscerally compelling. Immersed in evolving harmonies and asymmetrical rhythms, I found myself transported to a space outside the predictable and rigid schedules of junior spring, of deadlines and word counts, into a rustic, sunlit world where patterns existed to be deconstructed and reformed.
“If corporate feminism is the end of feminism, then it is the end of a movement that has been ending for generations—and continues to thrive, most indebted to its harshest critics.”
