An Apple a Day

Allen Paltrow

It’s far more common and less noteworthy for the young to obsess. We see it often, a girlish (or boyish) obsession with pink, followed by a girlish (or boyish) obsession with Edward Cullen.

"Never Travel Far, Without a Little Big Star"

Stephen Martis

Big Star are sacred to me – a summer devotional, everything that John Cusack and Emilio Estevez could never be for me, a holy confessor and mentor. I would be surprised if that other late auteur of American adolescence, John Hughes, didn’t draw inspiration from their sugar-coated, angst-filled gems in ...

The Lady and McQueen

Thúy-Lan Võ Lite

The emergence of Lady Gaga’s alien-like back-up dancers—bedecked in all-white outfits of synthetic leotard, tall spiked crown, and go-go boots—from their perfect row of white coffins in an entirely white room announces from the outset that "Bad Romance" is going to be a music video of insanity ...

Reading Salinger on the Train

Zack Newick

The link above the rest of the page was fresh and in red. It was urgent, it seemed. “J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, dies at 91.”

In Memoriam

Rob Madole

The most vexing thing, for me, as an admirer, is that he chose to hang himself, a gesture he had to have known was deeply dramatic, in the tradition of Brilliant Suicidal Writers like Woolf and Hemingway.

John Wheeler

Masha Shpolberg

“Black hole.” “Wormhole.” These are terms familiar to any English speaker if not from science fiction literature and films, then at least from pinball machines and arcade games. For a generation raised on Star Wars they have become all too familiar, yet they have not been around for very long. Both the two terms and the theory behind them were coined by one man – the late Princeton Professor Emeritus John Wheeler - in the late 1950s and 60s.

Robert Fagles

Lucas Barron

Robert Fagles, the iconic 40-year Princeton professor whose historic translations of Homer and Virgil enjoyed unprecedented commercial and cultural success in the 1990s and 2000s, died on March 26th following a long struggle with cancer.

Robert F. Goheen

Emily Forscher

Robert Francis Goheen ’40, the university’s 16th president, died of heart failure at PMC, Tuesday, March 31. He was 88.