The word “basic” was dead by the time Kreayshawn said it in 2011: “Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada / Basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother.” But in the word’s afterlife, “basic” has ceased to apply just to “basic bitches” and now affixes itself to all sorts of actions, objects and people.
As sad as it is infuriating, people living comfortably usually dismiss thoughts of poverty, disease, and war. Luckily, we are sometimes shocked out of emotional detachment and we think twice, maybe truly mournfully, about the helpless people we hear about … Read More
Just walk in Micawber Books, now as it phases out its inventory in preparation to close its doors in March, and you will undoubtedly bear witness to a sad scene, not quite of mourning but of definite melancholy, downtrodden emotion. Yes, of course, the friendly staff is still smiling; Bobbie Fishman, a long-time employee, interestedly asks what I need help finding, but there is a somber air looming over the store: the shelves in the used-book section have been disassembled and piled in orderly disarray, the stacks in the new-books section increasingly reveal empty wood as customers continue to remove the books and buy them at heavily discounted prices.
Daring, bold 5’9″ Jewish M with extreme good looks has decided not to be daring and bold by placing an ad for a similarly attractive F, height < 5'8". Think Annie Hall for a better looking, more bold and daring Alvy Singer. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it might not work.
Last year, the unlikely phrase “Hegel’s Bagels” appeared in this newspaper on two separate (although not unrelated) occasions: first, in the cover illustration; and second, as the title of an article. The article reported that the Princeton German Department had … Read More
“Below, the sea was moonlight, bright as commercial breakfast milk. The tide pulled forward and back, morse code telling me all the ways to escape the sleepy town.”
Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s most famous novel, Dora Bruder, is something like a ghost story, though not in the traditional sense. It is a ghostly story about a young man and a nation haunted by history. Modiano received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014, the fifteenth French writer to do so after the 2008 laureate Jean- Marie Georges Le Clézio. While Le Clézio’s writing is sensual and tinted with exoticism, Modiano’s is sparse, introspective, and heav- ily autobiographical, sometimes even termed “autofiction.”
I entered Alexander Hall, heart pounding, clutching a small spiral notebook and an orange ticket. The narrow, rounded hallway bordering the theater was filled with a labyrinth of lines. I frantically weaved through and approached an usher to ask her where I could wait in order to sit in orchestra seats.
Out of all the streets in the world stretching from Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg to Lombard Street in San Francisco, I have spent the most time traversing Witherspoon and Nassau here in my hometown of Princeton, watching the dynamic of businesses, the ebb and flow of success and decline.
As I walked back from precept on Wednesday something about the sickening humidity reminded me of a song my sister and I shared last July. And though I knew the two-day heat-wave to be cruel and short-lived, still I was lulled into summertime nostalgia by the eighty-degree April breeze.
