Author: Margaret Spencer
The Low Is What I Came For
Heart of stone, rind so tough it’s crazy / that’s why they call me the avocado, baby. Shouted alternately by a cheerleading squad and lead singer, this hook appropriately announces the return of Los Campesionos! in the single “Avocado, Baby” from their new album No Blues. It’s a little bit ridiculous, catchy and self-deprecating, and classic Campesinos.
by Margaret Spencer on
Greek Life
In the past month I’ve read loads of Greek classics. It was a really depressing month filled with people killing their kids, kids killing their parents, people marrying their parents, people stabbing other people in their eyes or at least stabbing themselves in their eyes. It seems like these things were so common in ancient Greece that sacrificial infanticide became unimportant enough that Homer left it out of why the Achaeans won the Trojan War.
by Lara Norgaard on
Fears, Beers, and Freshman Year
“Excuse me, do you have an extra cigarette?” I asked a woman outside New York Penn Station on my way home from Reunions in June. As I inhaled, the previous nine months began to transform from life to memory, things that were happening to things that had happened, becoming things that had happened to me rather than things I had made happen.
by Anonymous on
Fear Itself
I never sleep well when I am home. This is usually due to physical—not mental—distress: in eighth grade I inherited a three-quarter sized bedframe from the eighteenth century, a Sharpless heirloom that my grandparents wanted to get rid of. Rare is the vendor in this century that sells a mattress fit to its arcane proportions, so my parents threw two futons on it and told me it was temporary.
by Susannah Sharpless on
Caroline Feeley
“She never seemed a hundred percent after that,” Isabella Bersani, a sophomore teammate and friend of Caroline Feeley, says while recalling a match in December of 2012. Certainly, Caroline was less than 100%. On that day during the annual mixed doubles Christmas tournament, Caroline had hurt her MCL in nothing more than a game held for fun between the men and women of Princeton squash.
by Rachel Wilson on
New Jersey As a Non-Site
As a fourth-generation Jersey girl, I was immediately intrigued by “New Jersey as a Non-Site,” the featured exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum. Signs around campus described it as “art of the avant-garde(n) state.”
by Emily Kamen on
Monkey Business
This is not the first time I’ve written about Arctic Monkeys. There’s a good chance that this will not be the last time I write about Arctic Monkeys. And there’s good reason for that.
by Tom Markham on
Bathroom Lockdown
Shortly after missing the University’s emergency call, and being told by my dad that someone was running rampant with a gun on campus, I found myself barricaded in the women’s bathroom of Frist, B Level. My four Theta friends, their Mandatory Bonding session having been canceled, and two freshman ice hockey players had “jammed” the bathroom door closed with a doorstopper in hopes of stopping the gunman.
by Liani Wang on
Bridge Year, Abridged
It’s been over a year since I got back from my Bridge Year in Ghana, and I still don’t know how to answer that question. How do I condense an entire year’s worth of experiences into one or two sentences? My frustration is with the question itself—it doesn’t lend itself to complex or thoughtful answers.
by Yoni Kirsch on
In Yellowstone
As far as I can tell it is impossible to be fewer than 6,000 feet above sea level when visiting Yellowstone National Park. The altitude yields legendarily bitter winters. Snowfall for much of the year is drastic and unrelenting; many of YNP’s larger resident mammals (those not asleep) migrate down and out of the park during winter’s most pitiless stretch in order to survive.
by Alex Moss on
Mother Tongue
My ears picked up on it the moment I walked through the entryway. As I walked up the staircase to the lecture hall, I could clearly make out sentences of the conversation being had behind me. It felt out of place to me, belonging to a different time and place.
by Catalina Trigo on
Pedaling Danger in Phnom Penh
I’d just been hit by a car, and I had the urge to go ballistic, to scream and curse at the idiot behind the wheel while banging dents into his hood. It seemed like a natural and reasonable reaction for me to have given the circumstances. But instead I just looked at him, wide-eyed, and tried to remain calm as I steered my bike towards the side of the road.
by Rachel Bergman on