There’s no reason that competence and authenticity should be odds with one another. Yet many of the ways that we read authenticity—Bernie Sanders’ oversized suits, per say, or Trump’s disregard for political correctness—do defy the codes through which we usually measure a candidate’s fitness for office.
A month ago, before any of us took semiseriously the idea that Donald Trump might win the Republican primary race, coverage of Trump in the media presented an instructive paradox:
In the early hours of a Friday in the spring of 1978, two hundred and ten Princeton students piled into Nassau Hall and occupied it for twenty-seven hours.
You’re in America, you’re busy, you don’t have time to keep up with politics all over the world. There are a lot of parties, a lot of elections. Who can follow all of them?
Last week President Obama released a Buzzfeed video called “Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About” to tell people that February 15th deadline for enrolling for health care. I saw the link on my Facebook wall on Thursday and, in … Read More
After being disinvited from a panel on campus about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Associate Professor Max Weiss wrote in The Daily Princetonian, “Princeton must remain a place where open debate and academic exchange is encouraged and allowed to flourish, even on the most controversial issues.” It would be a lot easier to take him at his word had he not just convened a panel on academic freedom the week before, to which he invited zero dissenting voices.
On July 28, I attended a meeting of the Princeton mayor and council. I had been asked to come by a member of Food and Water Watch. The pro-consumer NGO wanted a student environmentalist there to show support for a proposed local fracking ban. I had never been to any such meeting, and didn’t know what to expect.
Last month, the members of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society found Edward Snowden guilty of treason. On other campuses—even Princeton’s aristocratic, Northeastern peers—Edward Snowden is a kind of geek-dissident hero who harnessed his hacking powers for good to reveal the excesses of the National Security Agency.
