“Think surfing. What comes to mind? White beaches and tropical blue waters, perhaps. Laidback beach bums with long, sun-bleached hair. California, Hawaii, the South Pacific. You probably do not think of snowbanks and dark, churning, sub-forty-degree water. Pale, shivering guys in head-to-toe neoprene and with accents harsh as the weather. You almost certainly do not think of New Jersey.”
“You are buzzed in after a moment, as if you are entering a doctor’s office, as if you are a patient, as if the Freud, whose eyes stare out from the tiers of brochures in the museum’s front room, will tell you in due time what your dreams mean.”
“Zach Feig ’18 is organizing a staged reading of monologues, submitted anonymously by students at Princeton, about their struggles with eating, eating disorders, nutrition, weight loss, weight gain, and dieting. The project’s goal is to generate conversation and community around maintaining a healthy relationship with food. The Nassau Weekly has worked with Zach to showcase a small collection of these monologues, printed here, with a similar aspiration.”
“Granny Annie had devoted her life to others in a manner that was awe-inspiring. Even winds upward of 100 miles per hour and torrential rain could not stymie her optimistic spirit, the hope that coursed through her family’s veins.”
“They were like glass eyes, not really looking at me but looking beyond me. And that was the moment the cold sweat washed over me. This wasn’t Max. He wasn’t here.”
This piece was originally written for a freshman seminar “Poverty Policies and the Dispossessed in America” in December 2017. It has been published to honor April 16th, 2018, which marked the 4th anniversary of the sinking of Sewol Ferry. Spring … Read More
“I look out my bedroom window and admire Sacré-Cœur. The clouds inch past, the sky pales, then blushes, and before I know it the Eiffel Tower is alight, flashing like a jolly giant steel Christmas phallus. Every hour on the hour.”
“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.”
Princeton’s degree of social exclusivity is abnormal. Whether compared to colleges whose social lives are dominated by bar culture, or colleges with extensive Greek life, Princeton stands out in the extent of its social hierarchy and in the lack of truly inclusive late-night social spaces.
“Perhaps we must accept that we are simply watchers of beautiful forms. And if we acknowledge that we are observers, bound by our own frailties and limitations, we may be able to rescue the memory of what was, for an instant, exquisite.”
“I scribbled a question on my scrap of paper and tossed it into the designated baseball hat: Can you tell us a little about hookups and relationships at school?”
Memories may fade as distance grows wider between ourselves and our young selves, but one thing remains constant: if we dig down deep into the recesses of our experiences, hold light up to the seeds of our current moment, brush off the dust, we might find something worth writing about.
