Starbucks

February 15, 2008

From the Editors

Dearest Nasslings: Welcome to Starbucks Coffee™ Presents: the Nassau Weekly’s Corporate, Consulting, Crass Consumer Culture Issue. We’ve made a wonderful friend from Seattle with a bone-crushing handshake, and boy-oh-boy if we aren’t rolling in it this week. Now served up: … Read More

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The Fifth Column

My father did consulting for years. Whenever he—or my uncle, also a consultant—began talking about work, I thought about their offices. They were small, poorly-lit rooms with terrible furniture, located in commercial parks off county roads. They were depressing. My … Read More

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Week in Review

It came to (and, it should be noted, faded from) the national attention that San Diego resident John Corcoran taught high school in California for 17 years without being able to read, write, or spell. A college graduate, Corcoran’s secret … Read More

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Me, Me, Me, Me, Me

Though it might otherwise be dismissed as a horribly-written play, Me, Myself & I inspires additional disappointment, flowing as it does from the pen of three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee. A moving and clever piece, it is not. Perhaps the only element that could have saved and justified its stodgy formal progression—an insistent meta-theatricality—comes off as forced, hackneyed, dismissible. Yes, Albee reveals, these are actually actors onstage. We get it. Got it. Good.

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Heady Gabber

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a fitting play for Princeton University. It takes place within the well-furnished walls of a bourgeois apartment, and is concerned with comfort, or more accurately with the horror of comfort. Like many students on campus, Hedda enters the stage entirely provided for yet entirely hungry, perversely hungry.

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Restaurants in Review

Sotto Happy Hour: Drinks That Rival Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino Though it is no replacement for the Annex, Sotto happy hour is still the best deal in town. House wine and mixed drinks are only two fifty; cocktails like the … Read More

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Looking At a Childhood Afternoon, As From a Moving Car

Looking back, I can recount— although perhaps, at times, incompletely, and often, I admit, sensationally—— a brief episode between my four-year-old self and a close childhood friend: a young girl named Mary, similarly diminished in age and stature, a miniature co-star, with whom I shared an afternoon that I will always remember.

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I Have Met the Future, and the Future Is the Weekend

Last weekend I was visiting my good friend, T— and arrived at his domicile in the wee hours of the afternoon shortly before he usually awakes. I had not yet broken my fast, and I searched through his cabinets for … Read More

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No Decency

First Exhibit. Here is the July 1, 1933 issue of Das Neue Tagebuch, a newspaper for German exiles in Paris. We read of a Jewish dentist, Maier, who was forced into poverty through a ban on Jewish practitioners. In mid-July, with his wife (also a dentist) on a quick vacation, Maier clandestinely worked in her office, but was later kidnapped by four S.A. men during lunch at his own apartment. According to the report Schwarzschild received, the men had stabbed Maier twenty-one times, broken his feet by crushing them with a copying press, and shot him in the head, causing his skull to explode.

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A Latte Runs Through It

The Tour “There’s so much to see and to do in New Jersey!” The Triangulites belted out the lyric from the Princeton Triangle show. New Jersey! Yeah! Except, we were in North Carolina! And we have sung the damn song … Read More

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Verbatim

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Overheard at Ivy Initiations

[Sophomore grabs Hot Ivy Senior's boob]
Hot Ivy Senior: That's just not classy. I don't know whether or not you usually use that, but I find that dinner works better.

Overheard late Thursday night in the U-Store

Smashed Girl (flirtatiously): Hi Eric.
Eric: Hey.
Girl: You're just saying that.
[...]
Same Smashed Girl, ten minutes later, eating furtively: I can taste the nonfat in this.

Overheard in Brown

Guy: I mean, for all my twisted shit, I've never been attracted to little boys... I mean, legitimately!

Overheard outside Pyne

Boy: I have to decide, you know, whether or not I want to socially exclude someone.
Girl: Yeah, I know, totally.

Overheard near Lake Carnegie

Guy 1: I'm a visual learner. If I see something done, I feel like I can do it better myself.
Guy 2: Like when you saw the man-gina scene in [i]Silence of the Lambs[/i]. You were like 'I can do that!'