On October 5, 2013, The New York Times published an op-ed by Dr. Gregory Berns, a professor at Emory University who concluded from a neurological experiment on man’s best friend that “dogs are people, too.” To examine dogs’ brains and their responses to emotion and perception, Dr. Berns trained them to sit silently still in an MRI scanner.
What separates Trump from his predecessors is his willingness, and the willingness of his supporters, to give up any pretense of subtly or slyness. Trump’s campaign, despite what the headlines say, is not unprecedented in this way. It has simply set at center stage the racial politics that Republicans have long trafficked in but preferred to dress in finer rhetorical disguises.
Dear Aron & Josh, Someone in my frat is making me fast for a week. I really don’t want to drop out of the frat but I don’t know if I can make it a week with just water. Help?
The people who introduced us to everything “social” and all things “innovative” have political positions and ideological stances that impact policy in real and tangible ways. As the language of entrepreneurship creeps into our vernacular, the politics of the entrepreneurial class creep into the halls of government.
What does it mean to rage? The word’s attractiveness results from the contingencies it contains. “Rage” is an expression of promise and uncertainty. The potentialities inherent in raging create the possibility for spontaneity in a place where it rarely exists. Life at Princeton is highly routinized. We live according to the logic of the Google Calendar. We schedule leisure time. We diastinguish between productive and unproductive activity. To rage in the moment is to temporarily shatter the predictability of existence in our human capital factory.
For a person with dietary restrictions, food in America is like a dense minefield of things he or she cannot eat. Meat and cheese are everywhere, sneakily stuck in the most unsuspecting locations.
There are thirteen churches and one synagogue in the town where I grew up. It is an anomaly for Bergen County, which is known for, among other things, the heavily Jewish bastions of Fairlawn and Teaneck. My synagogue community is small when compared to communities in the more Jewish towns, though it is larger than others in the county’s northwestern corner.
A recent editorial in Princeton University’s most conservative publication, the Daily Princetonian, predictably dismisses all of the demands made by the Black Justice League during the recent protests against racism on campus. But what is surprising, not to mention embarrassing for the University, is the anti-intellectualism expressed by the editorial board members.
Flanked by two shaven-headed handlers, Martin Brodeur sat at a rickety wooden table that looked slightly too small to be comfortable in a bookstore that has long since been put out business. Outside the store, devoted fans lined up for yards, standing in concentric loops in an adjacent strip mall, chattering excitedly or fidgeting with their fans’ jerseys—this was before smartphones dulled the pain of waiting on a line.
A man may take to drink,” wrote George Orwell, “because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Unfortunately, the Daily Princeton is like the man who rushes the growler a few too many times.
