Pre-frosh Misery
Last Thursday afternoon at about 4:10 I might have had one of the worst moments in my Princeton Career thus far. It was raining. It was two and a half weeks until my marathon and I couldn’t walk without limping on the quad I had pulled three weeks earlier. I had gotten six hours of […]
Michnikian Ethics
I am a Polonophobe by origin, tradition, and right. My ancestors on my mother’s side of the family, Swabians and Hungarians, come from the plains of the Neckar and the Danube, and probably looked at anything north of the latter and east of the Oder with much suspicion. My father’s side, meanwhile, was wise enough […]
The Facebook Age
Since the advent of the internet, the intimacy that we feel with our pop songs has changed. When content is so utterly customizable, taste is automatically effected; musical taste can now be articulated in a broad spectral slate of enumerations—the hyper-textual urge to craft for yourself a sort of personal genre, a musical aesthetic that […]
Aberrations of Nature!
Miss Victoria Lace and Miss Cee’Mour Cox, two professional drag queens, held court at the All Ivy Drag Competition on Frist Campus Center’s South Lawn. “Let’s see what’s edible,” Victoria commented ominously to Cee’Mour near the beginning of the show as they scanned the audience in the tent for “tasty” men.
Escaping Reality
Jean Baudrillard was a poor philosopher and a poorer sociologist. As a writer, he was inconsistent and cracked-out – as much inclined to the output of turgid rivers of prose clotted with effluvial jargon as he was to effervescent plunges of galvanic insight. As a theorist, he was one of the principal authors of what […]
Wikipedia Man
I remember perspiring heavily the first time I spoke to him. I had seen him before, tugging at tree branches at two in the morning, lumbering uneasily outside Princeton’s Firestone Library. His eyes had an emptiness that terrified me. He seemed to move as though in a zombified stupor, his arms reaching forward to coil themselves around the nearest prop or pole. His feet seemed to fall behind. I had seen Paul, the Wikipedia Man, inside Firestone before.
The Chabad Affair: Part 3
When I meet Howard Nuer ’07, a Hassidic Jewish student, three Sundays ago in his room, I am struck most by his bookshelf—filled to the gills with advanced math books and Hebrew scripture. The math major sits relaxed at his desk, which is covered in papers scratched with, alternatively, multivariable calculus or Jewish prayers. With […]
Blogging Dobby
David Dobkin is a busy man. As Dean of the Faculty, he supervises the hiring and tenuring of professors, and oversees each academic department on campus. A former computer science professor, Dobkin has also found time to teach a freshman seminar, and he serves as a JP advisor. But no matter how full his day becomes, Dobkin never neglects his side job: faculty photoblogger.