Roads, public libraries, and a respectful and helpful police force are all key, helpful features of a healthy state–and this is generally how the middle class experiences things. The government, however, has a more invasive, regulatory presence in the lives of people who lack power.
After a cross-country road trip and some time in France this summer, Pam moved to New York to begin her life as Uma—an “alternative electronic soul” singer ready to take the NYC music scene by storm.
If you’ve been on Facebook recently, you may have at some point stumbled across the page called Humans of New York. The page is insanely popular, with 1,424,016 likes and thousands of comments and shares on each post. The premise is relatively simple: every couple of days, photographer Brandon Stanton posts portraits of and quotes from interviews with random New Yorkers he approaches on the street.
Q: Can you say your name? A: Visala Tamara Alagappan Q: Where does that come from? A: It’s an Indian name from Chennai, which is in the south of India. More specifically it’s from this community which is south of … Read More
I’m sitting on one of the loveseats in the Starbucks on Nassau Street, weirdly conscious of my calves sticking to the cold leather seat covers, experiencing what I imagine only certain paparazzi have felt at the peaks of their careers. The strangeness of spending years seeing someone in two dimensions, only to have them sitting across from you, alive and fidgeting. Lorena Grundy gestures at my coffee cup.
Amantia Muhedini, one of two Albanian students at Princeton—who expects that at a certain point in your friendship, you will start calling her Ama (or momma Ama) and whose grandfather began the first bookshop in Albania after communism—claiming to have little attachment to home while discussing her attachment to tea and jewelry, to her parents’ coffee-shop-library, and to language. She sits cross-legged in one of the ethnically decorated room’s many chairs, mug in hand.
Looking for a place to start this article and overwhelmed by the weight of the subject matter before me, I do a quick experiment and type “virginity” into Google; I’m curious to see the most popular searches. “Virginity statistics, virginity auction, virginity quotes, virginity pledge” reads the list. The list doesn’t help much except to reestablish what I don’t want this article to be about.
I have been many things throughout my tenure at Princeton—a human, a tiger, a journalist, drunk—but I have never been a lady. Through no fault of their own, approximately one half of mankind never experiences the triumphs and challenges of womanhood, and I am destined to remain among them.
