On July 28, I attended a meeting of the Princeton mayor and council. I had been asked to come by a member of Food and Water Watch. The pro-consumer NGO wanted a student environmentalist there to show support for a proposed local fracking ban. I had never been to any such meeting, and didn’t know what to expect.
“You excited for Game of Thrones?!” I’ve been asking this ever since I saw the first ad for season three last Thanksgiving, and I’ve been asked it myself more than a fair share. The answer, of course, is always a resounding yes.
The first time I saw Zero Dark Thirty left me shaken to my core, affected to an extent I rarely experience at the cinema. I was deeply moved by what I saw as a powerful meditation on obsession and revenge … Read More
I am nine years old, give or take a couple years, and I have learned rage. Like a clumsy Hulk, I crush and I smash and I murder what must be dozens, if not billions, of ants.
According to a March 30, 2012 inventory, there were six labs at Princeton University that held nonhuman animals for experimentation. Between them, they contained over 10,000 mice, nearly 2,000 fish, nearly 1,000 larval salamanders, and a smattering of rats and frogs.
I recently ran a half marathon, which is 13.1 miles. This is the longest distance that I have ever run. I ran cross country and track all throughout high school, and workouts would foray into the ten mile range once in a while, but, as would soon be reinforced, that extra 3.1 is far from negligible. More to the point, the most I had run at once as a collegiate was only a tad over six, and this was nine days before the half marathon. What I am getting at is the following: this half marathon was a significant undertaking for which I was resoundingly underprepared.
Not long ago, Random House sent a number of free books to the Nassau Weekly in the hopes that we would exercise our considerable influence on campus to publicize and review their products. One volume in particular (a bright pink thing called Anatomy of a Single Girl) caught my eye. It wasn’t just the garish cover or the titillating title, it was—actually, no, it was mostly those things.
Every muscle in my body tensed, and a knotted cocktail of fear and nerves pushed my stomach up into my chest. I wasn’t there to make a scene, but I prepared to transition to a sprint at a moment’s notice. I tried vainly to resist making eye contact, but neither of us could resist the strange magnetism of the other’s presence.
I am much more comfortable sitting in my room writing about issues than I am screaming pithy rhymes in front of John Kerry’s house. And yet this past March 2nd, I found myself doing exactly that. I had finally been stirred to get off Microsoft Word and head to DC because so far as I know—and to his great loss—John Kerry doesn’t read the Nassau Weekly.
It is not often I get to encounter a fellow Dayton, so when I heard about a new documentary called Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde, I was suitably intrigued. The film was to be screened on Saturday, February 8 at the Princeton Public Library, as part of the Princeton Environmental Film Festival (PEFF).