Byline: Joshua Leifer

Metal Transcendence

Calling an album “transcendent” is like saying a book is “interesting.”

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Leftism in Limbo

At first glance, it seems that the culture wars never really ended; they simply slipped out of public consciousness temporarily.

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Revelry as Rage

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.

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Barry

Barry (whose name has been changed for this article) is a gangly kid who looks to be somewhere in that stretch of late adolescence characterized by patchy moustaches. In another world, Barry, gregarious and talkative, would be captain of his school’s debate team, or maybe a theater major. He is funny and he knows it.

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Playground Prejudice

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.

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Political Allergies

Spring semester means cheap beer, class treachery, and primary elections.

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Back to Basic

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.

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Lemon Pepper Wings

We cannot presume that Rick Ross is a mastermind, a genius or even sober. We cannot attest to his level of education, his employment history, or his net-worth. We have no idea where he came from: he claims to be Mohammed, the son of Moses, and the reincarnation of Haile Selassie. But, as he tells us on his latest album: none of that matters.

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In the Nation’s Pocket

Student activists campaigning for divestment—from fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturing companies, or companies operating in the Israeli-occupied West Bank—must face an administration that for decades has refused to acknowledge the central point at the very core of any divestment campaign: that the university’s investments should be considered as part of the university itself.

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Our Reactionary Monolith

Last month, the members of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society found Edward Snowden guilty of treason. On other campuses—even Princeton’s aristocratic, Northeastern peers—Edward Snowden is a kind of geek-dissident hero who harnessed his hacking powers for good to reveal the excesses of the National Security Agency.

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Entrepeneurship’s Hostile Takeover

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.

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Conservative Anti-Intellectualism on Campus

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.

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