Category: Reflections

On Imperfect Apples, Mosquito Bites, and the Consciousness of Worms

“I like to believe our small acts make a difference, or maybe I just want to be a savior.”

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Who in the Pinke

Twenty-two years and some number between one and 365 days before this article was published, I, William Pinke, bungee-jumped out my mother’s womb and into the world, a mindless, hairless, obese blank slate. I was given only four things that day: my name, my brain, my body, and a blanket. Since then, I have carried each through every stage of my development, but of the four only my name has remained unchanged.

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Hellas Historic

Picture me this fall break, up on the Athenian acropolis, staring down the Parthenon, trying to figure out anything at all. It’s bright if that helps. I’m up there on a trip with Princeton’s Humanistic Studies Sequence. Written HUM, pronounced … Read More

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Monozygotic

“In the birth of night, we are interlocking curls again.”

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Pursuing the Pourover

Hipsterism is just as absurd in Hong Kong as it is in Princeton.

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Pitching Princeton

A few months ago, a prospective student from my high school (let’s call her “Susan”) visited Princeton. I did not know her—her interests, her talents, her social proclivities—and yet I found myself on the verge of launching into a speech about how Princeton is the best school—probably in the world—and how she would in all likelihood be denying herself the possibility of self-transcendence if she applied elsewhere early action.

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Faith & Identity

On Unitarian Universalism: “Identity is fluid, and its discovery is a personal and communal journey.”

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1000 Words

1. ‘Cody’ was my friend’s brother and the only one who didn’t gasp as I lowered all seventy pounds of me into the crowded hot tub. “You’re disgusting,” one of the girls said, with awe, my first experience with the appropriation of insulting words as compliments. Later we spun a champagne bottle on the cold basement floor and I landed on him. My hair smelled stale from pool chemicals as it brushed wet against his face. He was my crush that whole year, until he didn’t make it into advanced math and I grinded with another boy at the seventh-grade dance.

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Jeff Bezos Launches Us to 1892

A Nass writer meditates on staggering levels of income inequality amidst excesses of wealth.

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Note to Self

Remember this: it was 1 am and you stumbled through slush, which was stained red by the clay gravel of Prospect Avenue. Somehow you ended up alone, which I think happens to everyone at least once, and which meant you … Read More

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Dangerous Liaisons

I personally didn’t confess to myself that I had an impossible crush on my RCA until about a month in, impossible because of my sexual ineptitude, and impossible because so far, his role had been less disciplinary and more parental.

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The Blades

“The body politic existed as it should; the blade grew to join the body as it should; the body bowed to the wind — all as it should.”

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