Category: Culture

Mischief Managed

Spoiler alert: Harry doesn’t die. He probably should, but he doesn’t, and there’s not really much we can do about it. The day the seventh book came out, my friend and I sat in the bathroom of our bunk at camp and read the entire thing.

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Mind Over Mirror

For a class called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” that I took last semester, we were tasked with many activities meant to make us aware of what it meant to be a woman, and a woman in a body, and a woman in a body in a society alternatingly fascinated and disgusted with that body.

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In Memoriam, Online

Her page, arrested in those golden years before anybody cared how many likes your profile picture had, was the picture of adolescence: I smiled when I saw the wall posts about biology homework, the album titled “January!!” In 2008, she had attended Homecoming and a Quidditch Club Meeting.

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Survival of the Fitness Myth

When I walked into the women’s locker room at Dillon gym earlier this week, I noticed a poster that made me bite my lip. Tacked up between weekly fitness schedules, the sign grabbed my attention with the headline: “The weight is over.” The line, I thought, could have been pulled from a diet product ad—Sensa, maybe, or Alli. It was the sort of cheesy slogan you see on caffeine-and-diuretic “supplements” at CVS.

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Got Mare’s Milk?

Daniel patrick O’Connell does not blend in with the Ulaan Baatar crowd. A preppy, robust, white-haired Cottage alumnus, he wore a pink bow tie to work today because it’s Friday, and he sticks out almost comically as he walks past the locals on the Peace Avenue sidewalk downtown.

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Revenge Porn

If you’ve ever sat behind me in a class or glanced at my laptop screen while walking past me in Frist, you may have wondered why there is a band-aid covering my webcam.

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Daffy Ducks

Phil Robertson thinks that homosexuality is a slippery slope towards chicken- and toaster-fucking, and in his mind, every black person he met before Civil Rights was just hunky-dory, with no need for more voting rights or nonsense like that. The debate surrounding his interview is so intense, or at least so loud, that Internet activists have tricked themselves into thinking that this is a good and necessary fight.

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All Grown Up

Earl Sweatshirt looks so young. His baby face bears a sparse mustache I associate with high school boys trying to prove they’ve hit puberty, and he’s swallowed by an oversize Yankees jersey. Maybe it’s just because I’m so close to the stage, and to other people he seems older than his nineteen years.

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Facebook’s New Gender Options

When Facebook expanded its gender options early this February, many users were finally able to represent themselves authentically to the online community. The popular social network, which had previously required users to list themselves as either male or female, added a new “custom” gender option to accommodate individuals who do not identify with the traditional gender binary.

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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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The Problem with Black History Month

On February 18th, three white students competed on College Jeopardy. In the second half of the show, which, thanks to the Internet, can be viewed on YouTube, the contestants sped through five of the six categories, which included obscure topics such as “Weather Verbs” and “International Cinema Showcase.” For 10 minutes, I waited for any of them to choose a question from the sixth category labeled “African-American History.”

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Dear Metta World Peace

Metta, you don’t know me, but I know you. And I’ve known you. You were an Indiana Pacer from the time I was 10 to 14 and children in Indiana grow up knowing the names of Pacers the way they know the Pledge of Allegiance. But then when I was in sixth grade you almost strangled a fan at a Detroit Pistons’ game and got yourself traded.

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