“Hey, what’s with that guy?” I laughed, gesturing to a deeply tanned, middle-aged man who is dancing with two shady-looking Vietnamese women, one over six feet tall. We’re next to a small bar in the backpacker district of Ho Chi Minh City. The six-footer clawed at the man ...

I've finally begrudgingly admitted to myself that I am a bad writer. I'm particularly bad at writing dialogue, which I suppose underscores that I am a horrendous conversationalist, by which I mean I am hopelessly self-involved. I find this particularly unfortunate, because I regularly come up with ideas ...

The first stop was, logically, Hall 5, probably the best hall of the convention and the home for current video game titans Microsoft and Nintendo. Microsoft’s entry into the video game market is a recent development to this writer who remembers the days of debating whether Genesis or Super ...

Soon our hour of traveling past fields of grain and windmills in the plains of Saxony came to an end, and we arrived at the Leipzig Central Train Station. It was time to get to the Convention Center. At first I opted to follow the fat kid (the first one ...

We were ripped off, as usual, as the three of us stepped out of the taxi and into a steamy, puddle-filled section of Hanoi. Adam, a towering Beta from Long Island, wasn’t too happy. “Fifty five thousand fucking dong! Fuck that’s like four dollars. I knew we shouldn ...

It is not often that I feel like a cultural alien. My formative years, which afforded me the priceless opportunity to forge a fine intellect and noble character, were instead spent imbibing cable TV, movies, magazines and every significant album in the rock and rap canons. I therefore know the weight and nuance of the associations borne by words such as ʻNascarʼ and ʻCristalʼ and can deploy them to well calibrated effect. In the past year, however, I have felt myself socially crippled when faced with jokes, insights and analogies that hinged on understanding of the nature and habits of a human type known as ʻThe Hipsterʼ, a type with whom I was only vaguely acquainted.

When I stepped into the René Magritte exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I stepped into a Magritte painting. The artist in many of his paintings depicted the ultimate “common man,” pudgy and ambivalent in bowler hat, overcoat, and cane. But Magritte placed this man in surreal ...

In an episode of The Simpsons, Ned Flanders goes mad. Lashing out wildly at every person in the town of Springfield, Flanders' acid tongue finally rests on Lisa Simpson, the town know-it-all. "And here is Lisa," Flanders snaps, "Springfield's answer to the question nobody asked." If you would like ...

Or rather, your notion of the face in Baudelaire is evasive.
Poetry’s stock has fallen; that of the novel, the short story—that of prose—has risen. The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books have run articles addressing the former and latter, respectively. But you survey ...

Last month, senior music major Steve Eaton presented his thesis composition. The performance was broken into two sections. In the first, the audience sat in typical fashion, facing the musicians as they played. The last piece of the first section was two minutes long. The song consisted of one chord, played once and sustained over the duration of the piece. The movement of the song was all in the flux and change of the chord as the wavelengths gradually distended, warped, and eventually faded.

Last Thursday afternoon at about 4:10 I might have had one of the worst moments in my Princeton Career thus far. It was raining. It was two and a half weeks until my marathon and I couldn’t walk without limping on the quad I had pulled three weeks ...

I am a Polonophobe by origin, tradition, and right. My ancestors on my mother’s side of the family, Swabians and Hungarians, come from the plains of the Neckar and the Danube, and probably looked at anything north of the latter and east of the Oder with much suspicion. My ...

Jean Baudrillard was a poor philosopher and a poorer sociologist. As a writer, he was inconsistent and cracked-out – as much inclined to the output of turgid rivers of prose clotted with effluvial jargon as he was to effervescent plunges of galvanic insight. As a theorist, he was one of the ...

I remember perspiring heavily the first time I spoke to him. I had seen him before, tugging at tree branches at two in the morning, lumbering uneasily outside Princeton’s Firestone Library. His eyes had an emptiness that terrified me. He seemed to move as though in a zombified stupor, his arms reaching forward to coil themselves around the nearest prop or pole. His feet seemed to fall behind. I had seen Paul, the Wikipedia Man, inside Firestone before.

I love me some baby Jesus.
Mmm, hmmm. A little baby Jesus.
Yummy.
But say the baby Jesus grew up and that after graduating from Nazareth High, he went to Princeton with the aid of our progressive financial aid program to make up for the money that he didn’t ...

The assertion “I’m not really religious, but I’m spiritual” generally serves its purpose. My devout Christian friends are silenced, and the rest of the religious conversationalists generally nod their heads in agreement. “Yeah, me too,” several agree. “I’m spiritual, just not religious.” Some might add that they ...

The first thing they do when they get your freshman rooming preferences is they throw them in the trash. They just dump them right in, piles of them crunched up and discarded until that great big bin is brimming full with them. And then – then the real thing starts. They shut the blinds and dim the lights. They lock the office door. And finally, when everybody’s seated, when everyone is ready, they begin to assemble the hell that is our roommate pairings, exhibiting all the tact and skill of a television writing staff as they concoct these garish personal sitcoms that recall either Perfect Strangers or, for the more unfortunate, No Exit.

There are mannequins coming out of the ceiling. That is the first thing you notice when you walk into the Paper Moon diner. There are mannequins tangled in ceiling fans with garlands of ivy. There are Barbie dolls and action figure heads glued to the walls. There are old alabaster ...

Rabbi Eitan Webb, when I come to interview him early last Wednesday in his Nassau Street apartment, is juggling with ease five things at once. The sun rages to highlight red flourishes in his beard and the car beeps become louder as the Princeton Borough awakens, but he is preparing to have some thirty students over for Passover seder, arranging to have a Matzah Ball party with a middle weight boxing champion, balancing his son on his lap, updating the Chabad website, and fingering an official letter from President Shirley Tilghman.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it." – G.K. Chesterton

Given the dust of the earth, God created Adam; given my article, you created this. It was with pleasure and confusion that I read your response for the first time: pleasure, for while I must wonder if we will convince no one other than our friends and the others’ enemies, this exchange must represent some blip to public intellectual debate at Princeton; confusion, because I have struggled to understand several of your arguments. But that is my fault. Finding myself in the post-earthquake world that you mention in your letter, I shall content myself with playing the Candide to your Pangloss.

I recently spent a week in London. I decided, then, to review its nation, England. Here is my account . . .
England is a country that is in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s close to big Europe. Its terrain includes grassy field, rocky road, river, tree-dotted park, concrete, sea, and people-dotted street ...

You are enormously desirable. More desirable than you realize, even if you have an excess of confidence in your own good looks and god-given pheromones. In fact, you could be horribly maimed and they would still want you – not because of your brains or your family yacht or even your ...

As any Princetonian who has followed the fates of Goldman Sachs and other bulge-bracket investment banks would know—given the 100 first-round interviews that Goldman gave out for summer internships, I’m assuming this group is sizeable—an increasingly disproportionate amount of these firms’ profits have been generated by trading ...

There was a time when the idea of a different spin on the dry humor of The Daily Show might have made sense. Around the time that Stewart and co. produced America: The Book, they were a twister (or some other forceful natural phenomenon) of popular criticism with an immense ...

Humbert Humbert is far from a straightforward man, but he did have the decency to commit a straightforward crime. Lolita was a tender young twelve, her suitor perhaps three times that; whatever physical, metaphysical, sexual, magic or aesthetic power she may have wielded over H.H., she was a child and he was a man of immoral actions.

I am not with the times when it comes to television. Schadenfreude TV upsets me; I can’t watch it. You know what I’m talking about: the semi-scripted reality shows, the “true life” documentaries, the TV that makes you want to die. I know you remember the episode of ...

Every respectable ideology needs an encyclopedia. The editors of the Enlightenment Encyclopédie, when composing the organizational frontispiece to the work, situated religion but a few spokes away from superstitions and black magic, while the reader of the entry on “Cannibalism” interested in related themes would find himself advised to consult the “Eucharist” entry, were he to consult the book’s reference notes. The good Bolshevik editors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, for example, were quick to minimize the entry on “Jews” in the face of the Soviet anti-Semitism of the early 1950s.

Paris: city of romance, city of wine, cheese and…belligerent drunks? Gropers on the subway? Public urination? Though it is called the City of Lights, Paris, as I have come to know it, actually has a dark and seedy underbelly.
Having decided to study here for the semester, I am ...

The Winter 2006 issue of the Nassau Literary Review has been out since January, meaning that if you haven’t read it by now, you’ll need to pull some strings to even get a copy. And yet you should. Think of it as a wise investment: ask the editors for a copy now, and win the lottery later.

Senator Joe Biden wasn’t the first to peg Barak Obama as counter to a stereotype. Indeed, before Obama became a U.S. Senator, before he became a presidential candidate for that matter, he was generally known as an “articulate,” “well-spoken” black man. “Doesn’t he look clean-cut?” Obama’s ...

They call it bumper car diplomacy in international relations--the idea of decisions made not because of an over-arching grand plan, but due to political exigency, the needs of the moment. These days it could seem our lives are practices in this art. We feel we might lack that unifying force ...

Princeton University is a warped, funhouse mirror image of Hollywood, where the oldest and least attractive people are the stars and the beautiful children of privilege pay high prices to stand briefly in their presence. Like Princeton, Hollywood is a destination for the ambitious - heroes on a quest to make ...

I haven’t really paid attention to professional basketball since the last time Patrick Ewing sweated all over the Garden’s courtside seats. I used to love the NBA, and almost everything about it, but my fandom lapsed several years ago; as I write this, the All-Star Game is going on, and I’m watching “Patch Adams.” (I love it when Robin Williams cries.) Yet in the last week or so, my attention has returned to roundball, and specifically, to the story of John Amaechi.