Byline: Eleanor Barkhorn

Why I Am Here

My students keep asking me why I am here. It is a good question. I am an anomaly at Greenville-Weston High School. I am white in a school where most teachers, and nearly all students, are black. My race fascinated my tenth graders for the first few days of school. One student asked if I found the term “white” offensive, and if I would prefer that he refer to me as “Caucasian.” Several students asked to touch my hair.

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The Insider Outsider

Being an outsider—or at least portraying yourself as one—pays in a Princeton USG presidential race. For the past three presidential elections, the USG Vice President has run and lost to a candidate that promised to be a breath of fresh air in the stale world of Princeton student government.

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Untangling “Tanged Up in Blue”

“Tangled Up in Blue” is not Bob Dylan’s most convoluted song; “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” with its references to eleven-dollar bills and hanging around in ink wells, probably wins that title. It is not even the most confusing ballad on Blood on the Tracks; Wendy Lesser is right on in her analysis of “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts”: “There are these huge gaps…what [Dylan] leaves out is more interesting in some ways than what he puts in.”

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Nobel Nerds

Early one morning in mid-October, while most of his classmates were sleeping off hangovers or late night study sessions, Zack Woolfe sat in front of his computer, eagerly pressing his internet browser’s “Refresh” button. The Princeton University senior was up … Read More

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Desperately Seeking Franny

The first two times I read Franny and Zooey, I was going through, to borrow a phrase from Salinger, a “blue period.” I have come to identify these low times with the term “melancholy,” a gloomy Victorian adjective that has … Read More

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The Lonely Conservative

Evan Baehr feels oppressed. This alleged marginalization has nothing to do with race; he’s white.

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Legacy

I walked into the University chapel with a group of white-haired men in blue suits. I paused in front of an usher who wore a nametag with an orange and black ribbon pinned to it: Somers K. Steelman ’54. I extended my hand for a program. He looked at my unbrushed hair, sweatshirt, jeans, and flip flops.

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