Reconciling Art and Artist
When I visited the Woody Allen papers before winter break, the allegations against Mr. Allen of sexual abuse had not yet resurfaced. Those accusations, presented by his daughter Dylan Farrow in the New York Times on February 1, have reignited an age-old debate about the relationship between an artist’s personal life and the content of his artwork.
by Alex Costin on
I Got a Peanut Allergy for My 19th Birthday
Two nights before my nineteenth birthday, I was studying for my last final exam, which was supposed to take place the following evening, spooning peanut butter into my mouth. Suddenly my tongue started to tingle and swell, my chest and neck began to itch, and my throat started to close. I soon found myself at the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro (PMC) with an epi-pen in my arm.
by Emily Kamen on
Hello, My Name Is ______.
I was seventeen. A senior second semester saturated with drugs, alcohol and bad decisions written off as “youth” had ended in a hospital bed on prom night, and, subsequently, in daily, forced AA meetings. I’d thought I was on top of the world: going to an Ivy League school, surrounded by friends, graduating top of my class.
by Anonymous on
Naked
Monday evening at ten of seven, I finish my dinner at Rocky dining hall, walk down Witherspoon Street to the Arts Council of Princeton, and make my way to the theater on the second floor. Minutes later I stand in the center of the room on a podium, naked, with the eyes of a dozen middle-aged strangers trained on me.
by Doug Wallack on
Frugality
I’ve missed out on a lot of things due to lack of money. As bad as that sounds, I often forget about it. But there are times I am reminded. This will be about those moments I am reminded, not in a melancholy sort of way, not a boo-hoo story about being the pauper of the town, but instead as an account of how I curiously grew into a frugal lifestyle; how I couldn’t afford things, and how that resulted in me not wanting them.
by Kovey Coles on
You Are Dancing on a Slick Gym Floor
Watch the balloons sway in the center of the slick dance floor. You are here and you are not here, swaying yourself on too-thin heels and much too much mixed drink. Tie your hair back. You’re hopped up on hoping the ending of your night will deliver what the beginning has promised since you fished your junior prom dress out of the dorm closet you’re sure has moths.
by Rachel Stone on
Prisoners Do Not Respond
I didn’t think much about what it would be like to participate in 7×9 until about thirty seconds before I started my shift. There was a grungy looking twenty-something year old man sitting on the ground, facing the girl I was to replace in what seemed to be an expression of solidarity. The situation would not have felt much less uncomfortable had she been an actual prisoner and not a Princeton student sitting outside of Frist.
by Joel Simwinga on
Homeward Bound
As of last year, I have lost my status as a permanent resident of New York City. I have in many ways become a stranger to the concrete jungle that taught me that the world contained more than my five-person family and two-bedroom apartment located in the scenic neighborhood of Parkchester, centered in the middle of the Bronx, a borough known for little more than its poverty and baseball team.
by Lovia Gyarkye on
My Friend Mike
I first met Mike a year and a half years ago, in the month following my high school graduation. I was spending the summer in Manhattan and, for the first time in my life, my youth didn’t feel burdensome or constricting; I no longer wanted to be just a little bit older. I was studying Jewish texts during the day, and puzzling out the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic felt intellectually challenging and spiritually exciting in a way that my overcrowded public high school classes never had.
by Maya Rosen on
An Invisible Minority
I spent this past fall break on a Pace Center Breakout trip in our nation’s capital, visiting congressional lobbies, vocational employment centers, and the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where I saw, firsthand, those who had experienced the casualties of war. Eating in the hospital cafeteria, I sat among masses of amputees, the people who actually comprise the looming, abstract statistics we hear always on the news.
by Nick Sexton on
Mommy Says
Once a month, my mother would choose a single-parenting experience she thought to be humorous or poignant and would write it down for the whole world to read (or at least the subscribers of North Texas). My mother didn’t just archive my brother’s and my childhood, she created public records of all our most embarrassing moments.
by Hadley Newton on
Mortem Ex Machina
I remember the first time someone I knew died. My sister’s friend had gone missing, and when the news finally came that her death was sure, I privately went through my phone, which had previously been my sister’s, and searched for the friend’s name.
by Adlan Jackson on