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Sweet Strawberry Jam
Animal Collective doesn’t sound like a rock band. It sounds like a couple of shamans have sat down around a fire every once in a while with an acoustic guitar, a floor tom, and a delay pedal to effuse sixty captivating, otherworldly minutes of sound onto a patient, waiting line of tape. It’s a band…
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Experience This!
I spent this past weekend at the Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference in Seattle, Wash., an annual gathering of journalists, academics, and writers of all stripes to talk about pop music with varying degrees of seriousness. If you were there, you might have known what most of them were talking about, or you might…
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Analyze This
Barack Obama–U.S. Senator and Democratic candidate for president–has, if nothing else, my entire extended, voting-age family in a polarized tizzy. My mother isn’t voting for Obama because of his smoker’s teeth–my uncle because his middle name is Hussein. My father likes his health care platform–his father-in-law is filled with warmth by his back story and…
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The Life of David Hale
I first knew David Hale as a statistic. To the similarly uninitiated, he is the same magnificent number, one that transcends the SAT scores and GPAs and BACs for which lesser Princetonians acquire numerical infamy. A sophomore in Mathey College, David carries an unpretentious and wholly likable air that belies his reputation.
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Plouffing for Change
But come on, let’s be serious, here’s probably what happened. We all get it in our heads that we’d be better off missed every once in a while, contract supply to jack up the price a little, you know, like OPEC does every once in a while. Dude’s just tired of being taken for granted,…
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Portrait of the Decadent Youth
I want to tell you about this year; I want to tell you about what’s happened. I want to tell you about what went down in “Gossip Girl” and about what’s real and what’s fake, about how time passes in Princeton, about what mattered.
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I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
1. Lines removed from a play The answer’s in the desk. Oh, yes! This PROBABLY cures cancer. Meta! THE OL’ ONE-TWO! A dog eats a cell phone and it keeps ringing in its stomach. Oh, no! …eats the whole thing. …as explained by a Chorus. Baby talk. NO! Animal talk. NO! Baby talk. NO! ANIMAL…
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Girls Who Like Boys
Harvey Philip Spector might have fallen in love with Veronica Yvette Bennett on some late night in a recording studio, sometime around 1962. There were probably cigarettes smoked and fleeting glances exchanged. Most tempting to imagine is the two coming together over the music they made—lovely, cavernous music that would fill a classical concert hall…
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‘Einstein, Margarita, and the Bomb’
On a damp Friday afternoon in November, traversing the broad, entirely empty main courtyard has the feeling of trespassing. Whitman’s Class of 1970 theater is the setting, this particular Friday afternoon, for a screening of ‘Einstein and Margarita,’ a so-called “media opera” composed by Iraida Iusupova and with libretto by Iusupova and the poet Vera…
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Fast Times at Facebook High
The day the House Zuckerberg first decreed that high schoolers needed their own Facebook was a classic “what the fuck” moment: the outrage was pure, the anger irrational. We hated it, initially, for no reason other than that it existed and that it was just…stupid.
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Gossip Folks
We’ll continue watching Gossip Girl, perhaps, like we look through old postcards or yearbooks. We’ll speculate what it would have been like to watch it over the course of a school year, as though the show transpired in real time; what it would have been like to watch it with Kate or Shannon or definitely…
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Bail out my heart
The free market—or, more aptly, free market thought—finds itself, once again, on the defense. Popular judgment, abetted by politicians and pundits, has placed the blame for the current economic crisis squarely on faulty or missing financial regulation.