“Most plays have this rule imbedded in them,” said Khalil Sullivan two days before opening night of “Playing in the Dark,” which he wrote and directs for his senior thesis. “A play has an action, a desire that characters want, and obstacles in the way of completing that action.”
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
The morning of the Colin Powell lecture, I stood in line outside of Richardson Auditorium with my friend Beth. Beth takes Arabic. Last summer, she worked for a senator in Washington. She just applied to Woody Woo. She knows her … Read More
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 … Read More
I walked into the University chapel with a group of white-haired men in blue suits. I paused in front of an usher who wore a nametag with an orange and black ribbon pinned to it: Somers K. Steelman ’54. I extended my hand for a program. He looked at my unbrushed hair, sweatshirt, jeans, and flip flops.
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 … Read More
“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 the Jack of Hearts”: “There are these huge gaps…what [Dylan] leaves out is more interesting in some ways than what he puts in.”
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.
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 found the term “white” offensive, and if I would prefer that he refer to me as “Caucasian.” Several students asked to touch my hair.
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 is called the “white Kroger.” The one with the wilted produce and meager selection is called the “black Kroger.”