In our modern age, technology has made it so that the visually impaired are able to partake in many of the same activities as anyone else. Text-to-speech programs, which narrate a website, make it easy to browse the web. There … Read More
The Princeton Glee Club has been around since 1874, and it shows. This past weekend, while students flocked to productions such as “Clue” (the Musical?!) and “Arabian Nights,” the Glee Club performed Felix Mendelssohn’s epic oratorio, Elijah, in Richardson Auditorium, to an audience of senior citizens and music majors.
I’m sure I’m not alone in suspecting that, on occasion, those perfectly-overheard quotes reported in the “Verbatim” column of this paper are fabricated. It’s easy to imagine the editors sitting around a table, perhaps aided by humor-inducing beverages, cracking jokes until the quotes have written themselves.
This past Friday Whitman Theater filled with the South Asians, the gays and lesbians, the prefrosh, and the otherwise unaffiliated for the stand-up performance of Vidur Kapur.
Planned or not, we find in “a Moor” a delightful pun on “amor,” love, unfortunately unequaled by any wit in the script proper, but suggestive of a creative potential so undeveloped that its trace could easily escape the spectator’s notice or be trampled by an eye-roll as he hastens through the ninety-minute wilderness.
The audience for Samantha Power last Friday appeared to be the usual crowd for talks at Princeton: half students interested in the subject matter at hand, and half older townies getting a taste of culture. “War Crimes and Genocide Today: What Can One Person Do?” was hosted by the Woodrow Wilson School, and it showed in the composition of the crowd. The students had a confused, sympathetic mixture of careerism and noblesse oblige; one, after asking what she should do to prepare for her trip to Bosnia this summer (that’s right, she’s going to Bosnia, folks! Sniper fire!), was happily offered a card from the wife of a UN official. The older ones, on the other hand, had the weary, insecure but comfortable look of those inhabiting the many, multiplying rings of power just outside the one that matters. “What can one person do,” of course, is heard by all of these people as “What can I do?”—a question that, in its necessity and its limitations, cuts to the heart of what is both brilliant and unfortunate about Samantha Power.
What do you get when you take a group of gangly teenagers with teased-out hair and black eyeliner? Emo kids who let out their emotions through Good Charlotte? Well, yes – but that’s not all.
Given that “human,” in a biological sense, is just one step in some grander evolutionary process, Arthur C. Clarke wondered whether we might one day ditch our corporeal forms entirely and “live” forever as non-physical entities. One day, maybe, but not soon enough for the idea’s originator – Clarke is dead at the age of ninety.
Although some adults (my parents) don’t even know how to send text messages, it seems that the Finnish foreign minister, Ilkka Kanerva, has become quite the textpert.