This Just in from Panama
It is the most dangerous game in Panama – one where the hunter always becomes the hunted.” It was to these words of wisdom that I clinked my glass in preparation for my imminent discovery of those gargoyle-like beasts—the type one would only expect to see hanging off of the flying buttresses of Notre Dame […]
The Chabad Affair: Part 1
Rabbi Eitan Webb, when I come to interview him early last Wednesday in his Nassau Street apartment, is juggling with ease five things at once. The sun rages to highlight red flourishes in his beard and the car beeps become louder as the Princeton Borough awakens, but he is preparing to have some thirty students over for Passover seder, arranging to have a Matzah Ball party with a middle weight boxing champion, balancing his son on his lap, updating the Chabad website, and fingering an official letter from President Shirley Tilghman.
The Anscombe Debate: Pro
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.” – G.K. Chesterton
The Anscombe Debate: Con
Given the dust of the earth, God created Adam; given my article, you created this. It was with pleasure and confusion that I read your response for the first time: pleasure, for while I must wonder if we will convince no one other than our friends and the others’ enemies, this exchange must represent some blip to public intellectual debate at Princeton; confusion, because I have struggled to understand several of your arguments. But that is my fault. Finding myself in the post-earthquake world that you mention in your letter, I shall content myself with playing the Candide to your Pangloss.
Searching for the Underground
If one is to stand in opposition to the middling masquerade that is Princeton culture, to scowl openly at every meaty guffaw or celebratory chant, then one would hope to rest confidently on a wealth of personal depth. It is far more appealing, and far more interesting, to be a crusader for an idea than […]
The Tribulations of High School Chess
Sports are glorified because sports are clean. There’s always a clear loser and a clear winner. In the thrill of the moment, when caught up in our favorite spectator sports, we Americans know who to root for. Michael Weinreb, in The Kings of New York, takes on the challenge of casting chess, the pastime of […]
300 Erect Nipples
From the cinematic virtuosos who brought us Robocop 2 and 3 comes 300, a gripping tale of political intrigue, passionate romance, and fervent nationalism with, by broad consensus, fewer than thirty lines of intelligible dialogue. The majority of these preciously few lines convey the vital facts—that Spartans are fierce warriors, that Persia is a cowardly […]
Tell Me Why
Gregg Gillis sits in the library of Terrace Club; a few minutes ago he was eating potatoes. He is of average height and has enormous white teeth. He speaks rapidly and giddily, as though school has just been cancelled.