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Race in the Classroom
Greenville, Mississippi looks like a town that the Civil Rights movement forgot. Four decades after the Freedom Summer, this “Queen City of the Delta” still has two of just about everything: two McDonalds, two Catholic churches, two sides of town. There are two Kroger grocery stores. The one with the organic milk and fancy cheeses…
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Dispatches from the Delta III
Every Princeton senior experiences the same dilemma when searching for a post-graduation: to go to Wall Street or not to go to Wall Street. The lure of a New York finance job is difficult to resist, with its high salary and desirable location, plus “everyone is doing it” – or so it seems. At an…
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Dispatches from the Delta
For the last six months, people have been warning me about October. A few weeks after I received my acceptance e-mail from Teach for America, a man from the staff called me to discuss the school where I would teach in the fall.
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Why I Am Here
My students keep asking me why I am here. It is a good question. I am an anomaly at Greenville-Weston High School. I am white in a school where most teachers, and nearly all students, are black. My race fascinated my tenth graders for the first few days of school. One student asked if I…
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Not Just “Like a Virgin”
I learned a lot about sex when I was growing up. Thanks to my liberal Manhattan private school education, I had some form of sex ed every year of my life starting in fifth grade. Countless classes led by middle-aged women all too eager to unveil the mysteries of human reproduction to precocious tweens and…
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Desperately Seeking Franny
The first two times I read Franny and Zooey, I was going through, to borrow a phrase from Salinger, a “blue period.” I have come to identify these low times with the term “melancholy,” a gloomy Victorian adjective that has taken on the power of a noun in my vocabulary. I have started countless sentences…
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Tune Every Heart and Every Soul
Nearly every object in the Princeton University Chapel has been given in someone’s memory. Names of dead Princetonians are etched on the backs of pews, on plaques at the bases of statues, on the very stones that form the Chapel walls. The Chapel does not only memorialize individuals; it seems also to eulogize a past…
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Nobel Nerds
Early one morning in mid-October, while most of his classmates were sleeping off hangovers or late night study sessions, Zack Woolfe sat in front of his computer, eagerly pressing his internet browser’s “Refresh” button. The Princeton University senior was up at the ungodly hour of seven AM (one PM in Europe) to check the results…
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Is Orange the New Brown?
A few weeks ago, I was plugging away at my JP in the Mendel Music Library when I heard the unusual sound of shouting and pounding feet. I looked out the window and saw a small, male redhead running past Prospect House naked, yelling into a bullhorn.
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Untangling “Tanged Up in Blue”
“Tangled Up in Blue” is not Bob Dylan’s most convoluted song; “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” with its references to eleven-dollar bills and hanging around in ink wells, probably wins that title. It is not even the most confusing ballad on Blood on the Tracks; Wendy Lesser is right on in her analysis of “Lily, Rosemary, and…
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The Insider Outsider
Being an outsider—or at least portraying yourself as one—pays in a Princeton USG presidential race. For the past three presidential elections, the USG Vice President has run and lost to a candidate that promised to be a breath of fresh air in the stale world of Princeton student government.
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For Love of the Game
Last November, Josh Blaine was traveling down the coast of California, with the vague intention of reaching Mexico, when he stopped in Santa Barbara. Outside the city’s art museum, he caught sight of a man sitting next to a bike and a tennis racquet. Josh approached him and asked about the racquet. “There’s no bullshit…