Competitive Lit
When I was in eighth grade, a girl two grades up from me was writing a novel. I didn’t know much about her aside from her name, the fact that she was my classmate’s older sister, and that she was in the finishing stages of creating a work of fiction, but I wanted to become her, cut my hair short and type importantly on my laptop in my small school’s even smaller library.
by Rachel Stone on
Sunday Funday
We tend to moralize casually on the walk to dinner, and we’re all the more biting for it. “There’s something tragic in it, really…” a friend offered, trailing off. She spoke softly to me, but also to them, the “bright and tight,” as they stumbled back to campus on our narrow shared way.
by Tyler Coulton on
Mischief Managed
Spoiler alert: Harry doesn’t die. He probably should, but he doesn’t, and there’s not really much we can do about it. The day the seventh book came out, my friend and I sat in the bathroom of our bunk at camp and read the entire thing.
by Aron Wander on
Mind Over Mirror
For a class called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” that I took last semester, we were tasked with many activities meant to make us aware of what it meant to be a woman, and a woman in a body, and a woman in a body in a society alternatingly fascinated and disgusted with that body.
by Susannah Sharpless on
In Memoriam, Online
Her page, arrested in those golden years before anybody cared how many likes your profile picture had, was the picture of adolescence: I smiled when I saw the wall posts about biology homework, the album titled “January!!” In 2008, she had attended Homecoming and a Quidditch Club Meeting.
by Hannah Hirsh on
Survival of the Fitness Myth
When I walked into the women’s locker room at Dillon gym earlier this week, I noticed a poster that made me bite my lip. Tacked up between weekly fitness schedules, the sign grabbed my attention with the headline: “The weight is over.” The line, I thought, could have been pulled from a diet product ad—Sensa, maybe, or Alli. It was the sort of cheesy slogan you see on caffeine-and-diuretic “supplements” at CVS.
by Kat Kulke on
Got Mare’s Milk?
Daniel patrick O’Connell does not blend in with the Ulaan Baatar crowd. A preppy, robust, white-haired Cottage alumnus, he wore a pink bow tie to work today because it’s Friday, and he sticks out almost comically as he walks past the locals on the Peace Avenue sidewalk downtown.
by Malcolm Steinberg on
Revenge Porn
If you’ve ever sat behind me in a class or glanced at my laptop screen while walking past me in Frist, you may have wondered why there is a band-aid covering my webcam.
by Filipa Ioannou on
Daffy Ducks
Phil Robertson thinks that homosexuality is a slippery slope towards chicken- and toaster-fucking, and in his mind, every black person he met before Civil Rights was just hunky-dory, with no need for more voting rights or nonsense like that. The debate surrounding his interview is so intense, or at least so loud, that Internet activists have tricked themselves into thinking that this is a good and necessary fight.
by A.K. Williams on
All Grown Up
Earl Sweatshirt looks so young. His baby face bears a sparse mustache I associate with high school boys trying to prove they’ve hit puberty, and he’s swallowed by an oversize Yankees jersey. Maybe it’s just because I’m so close to the stage, and to other people he seems older than his nineteen years.
by Isabel Henderson on
Facebook’s New Gender Options
When Facebook expanded its gender options early this February, many users were finally able to represent themselves authentically to the online community. The popular social network, which had previously required users to list themselves as either male or female, added a new “custom” gender option to accommodate individuals who do not identify with the traditional gender binary.
by Kat Kulke on
Revelry as Rage
What does it mean to rage? The word’s attractiveness results from the contingencies it contains. “Rage” is an expression of promise and uncertainty. The potentialities inherent in raging create the possibility for spontaneity in a place where it rarely exists. Life at Princeton is highly routinized. We live according to the logic of the Google Calendar. We schedule leisure time. We diastinguish between productive and unproductive activity. To rage in the moment is to temporarily shatter the predictability of existence in our human capital factory.
by Joshua Leifer on