Confessions X
I didn’t sleep the night before my thesis was due. This is perhaps unsurprising to you. When it happened, it was unsurprising to me too, but it was also novel. I had never before worked through the night and not slept … Read More
by Ted Garzimo on
Bickering Ivy
I always assumed that I would join an eating club, but put no effort into understanding the process of joining. As such, I found myself in a foreign country, learning that I had not only missed the first round of sign-ins, but that bicker started immediately after break.
by Cezanne Simon on
Wrapped & Rapt
In middle school and high school, I was a wrapper. I wrapped every morning Monday through Friday of the academic year, as well as the occasional Sunday or summer day when possessed by the wrap spirit. I wrapped quietly and meticulously, with focus, usually one among an extended posse but sometimes solo. I haven’t wrapped since July, but I’m confident that I could pick it up again if I wanted to. I came of age as a wrapper, and I remain surrounded by the wrap’s ebon tendrils.
by Rafael Abrahams on
2 Stories
What am I supposed to do? I want you to tell me. I want you to tell me what am I supposed to do. Before you answer, I’ll tell you my story, and I’ll tell you hers. And then, I … Read More
by Scot Tasker on
Lever Levre Lever
When I googled the meaning of my last name, I felt the same way I felt while visiting the museum at Gettysburg when a docent urged me to search the database and see if my ancestors had been involved in the battle.
by Emily Lever on
Princeton ®
The way it came to me was in a letter. I think a lot of people got them, but I don’t know. It was from Dean Rapelye or maybe Malkiel, and it said something like “you are one of the particularly outstanding students admitted” and to “please consider coming to Princeton.”
by Isabel Henderson on
Pitching Princeton
A few months ago, a prospective student from my high school (let’s call her “Susan”) visited Princeton. I did not know her—her interests, her talents, her social proclivities—and yet I found myself on the verge of launching into a speech about how Princeton is the best school—probably in the world—and how she would in all likelihood be denying herself the possibility of self-transcendence if she applied elsewhere early action.
by Ben Jubas on
There But the Grace of God Go I
I’ve long believed the surest sign of a good mind is an understanding that things could be another way without allowing for the possibility of your resistance, through the agencies of people and institutions and objects that do not encircle or overlap yours. If there is a person here you love that person could instead be at Dartmouth caressing another and unaware of your existence; if you are right-handed your arm could instead be broken as a young child and you a lefty as a result; if today your father is a good father or a bad one he could instead swerve to miss an animal and drown in a cold river six months ago.
by Alex Moss on
Visualizing God
There is a debate among medieval Jewish philosophers about the permissibility of conceiving of God in physical form. Maimonides, heavily influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, lists the non-corporeality of God as one of the thirteen core principles of faith, and writes in his legal code that anyone who says that God has a body is a heretic with no position in the World to Come.
by Ben Jubas on
Dayton Martindale
His face was well-preserved, but the body was so frail. The outline of his ribcage protruded grotesquely against his sunken stomach. He was dead, and he looked it. A warm tear ran down my cheek as I read and re-read the placard standing next to the coffin: “Here lies Dayton Martindale.” I was sad, and I was scared.
by Dayton Martindale on
Arcadian Rhythms
I sit and breathe and try to recall my whole life. I now sit serenely in the brush by this shouldering road. It winds tightly through the Peloponnesian town of Megalopolis, where I sit, through the pink stucco homes clinging staccato to the high side of the mountain our bus, heaving, climbed. Rapt speech in the restaurant behind is mere chatter.
by Joel Newberger on
Maybe I Said Yes
Your whole life, you hear about the milestones that are supposed to change something inside you. For me, they came and went largely unnoticed. Birthdays, first kisses, the loss of my virginity, the first truly random sexual experience I ever had—all left me unmarked and wondering at how it was that I never felt any different. The summer after my senior year of high school, I walked home after sleeping with a man six years my senior and, after years of falling for people too easily, congratulated myself for not feeling anything. I thought that sex could not hurt me and that—to me—was a triumph of self-defense over feeling, one I held on to in the years that followed.
by Filipa Ioannou on