Just two weeks ago, the Princeton Packet announced that it would be permanently shutting down commercial printing services at its Witherspoon Street facility. For decades, the paper had printed the Nassau Weekly, the Daily Princetonian, and press releases for a number of local businesses, in addition to their own weekly publication.
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.
When one freshman sat down with the dean of her residential college last winter to discuss a medical leave, she was not expecting to spend the next eight months at home.
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.
“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.
When unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot by white police officer Darren Wilson this past August, Americans of all colors raised their voices in sorrow and outrage.